I like the pace of technology, both in finance and in health care, which I occasionally stray into. I have written for Securities Industry News, Risk, Institutional Investor and Alpha. For ten years I edited Windows in Financial Services, covering Microsoft technology in finance, and I continue to write for Banking Technology and Trading Places, both in London.

Microsoft Windows 8 Faces Slow Adoption In The Enterprise

Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system may not be widely adopted in enterprises until sometime in 2014.

Aaron Suzuki, CEO of SmartDeploy, which does technology deployment, upgrades and break-fix for enterprises, doesn’t see a lot of interest in moving to Windows 8 anytime soon, at least not from the IT side.

“There will be some tire kicking, but most of the adoption will be driven from the consumer side through the oft discussed bring your own device (BYOD) trend,” explained Suzuki, who admits he used to think the BYOD was BS.

“Now I expect more and more of it. Devices will be accessible and affordable, and I think they will be brought to work by people who want high performance high functioning tools, and I think that will drive enterprise adoption.”

Microsoft’s new platforms — phone, tablet and Intel-based Ultrabooks — and score pretty well with technology reviewers and users, ranking pretty close to the leading smartphones and the iPad. Some of the Ultrabooks look just as sexy as MacBook Airs.

The enterprise advantages of the Microsoft platform are clear — Active Directory, better management, and tools like PowerPoint and Excel on a tablet. After several years of lagging hopelessly behind in the cool factor, Microsoft has a chance to score with enterprise IT groups without permanently alienating employees who love iPads and iPhones, or Samsung phones and tablets running Android.

“Microsoft has a major advantage in management of devices and Apple has a long ways to go,” said Suzuki. By now, though, almost everyone in a company probably has at least one Apple device, so Microsoft really has to step up and compete.

Suzuki said business enterprises are ready for some new hardware since they have postponed refresh cycles because of the recession.

“They need a hardware refresh this year or next,” he said. Although Microsoft corporate works well with OEMs, he doubts that the field sales organization is prepared to offer an end-to-end sale with partners. Suzuki said that Microsoft and Intel don’t play well together, and since the phone runs on Qualcomm processors and the tablets on Nvidia, the support is fractured. Nor does it help that two leading partners, Dell and HP, are having their own rather public business issues.

“Most organizations got so far along with Windows 7 that to consider preparing for and testing a new wave of migration is the farthest thing from their mind. Plus, Windows 8 is a big change, not just a follow-on the way Windows 7 was.”

Enterprises are cautious in adoption; the advice for new Microsoft releases has long been to wait for Release 3 or Service Pack 2. Windows XP isn’t going away until the middle of the year, noted Suzuki and a lot of organizations are holding onto it until it dies.

“My expectation is that people will stick to Windows 7 and it will be the corporate standard for a long time.”

Vista, the operating system disaster, is one big reason.

“Microsoft has their own set of challenges. I think people love to hate it and there is distaste in the community over the problems with Vista.”

SmartDeploy has found Windows 8 to be very stable, he added, and he would encourage firms to move in a year, although he doesn’t expect them to act that quickly. Touch works well and provides a good combination of iPad and PC functionality — quick consumption with touch and then high productivity using the keyboard. One drawback so far is a shortage of applications that use touch, but the combination of touch and type does promise some relief from the chore of trying to type on iPad glass.

“I think you will see a gradual but increasingly hot uptake. The Ultrabooks bring elegant portability and the convertible PCs are becoming popular.”

Where is your organization in moving to Windows 8 and why? (Skip this question if you are still on Windows 95.)

Do you have apps where touch will be important? Are you planning to build touch-enabled apps or push suppliers to provide them?

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

The case probably varies by business and by user. In October I did a post on the way SunGard has developed an application for back office reconciliation in financial services and they sound touch was faster than using a mouse…they have done some testing which I wrote about more recently but expect to do a benchmark with a large European bank. That said, there hasn’t been a lot of business application development focused on touchscreens to date.

I think many an IT shop would love to get back to a more Microsoft-based environment — fewer device types to worry about, better security…even where BYOD is in place and users are responsible for their own devices I suspect IT gets help calls everything. But would be interested in hearing from people who are working with IT in large enterprises.

Well, I do not quite get that argument… “Fewer device types”? There is no platform on earth that has more different end user devices than Windows. Just look at the at least 50 different implementations of convertibles that have been announced for Windows 8. Designing an in-house application that is efficient and ergonomic for all these devices is about impossible. That argument had value when every Windows computer was about the same (same keyboard, same pointing devices, “windowed” environment). Now there is everything from touch, via stylus to keyboard/mouse, screen sizes range from 4″ to 30″, some touch screens lie flat in front of you, some hang vertically, some are tilted, some OS versions are windowed, some are full screen… There is no interface design that suits them all.

“Better security”? I strongly disagree. There is no more often hacked and compromised OS than Windows. But even worse than having “some” Windows is a mono-culture which ensures that every successful attack is guaranteed to affect absolutely everything at once, as could be seen quite well when a hack turned off the entire terminal 3 of Delhi airport in August 2011. All the compromised systems where Windows based, no Unix, Linux or Mac based computer was affected at all. Any CIO that gives a damn about security avoids monoculture like the plague.

Well, I have around 9,000 users total (on average) and since 2004 we have reduced our Windows clients to just below 1,800 (we want to be down to around 500 by the end of 2013, everything else goes to Mac OS X and Linux). These 1,800 are all on Windows 7 (or will be before XP support runs out). All our touchscreen devices are Apple devices (iPhones and iPads), no interest in Windows touchscreen devices or Windows 8. All our in-house development is either Web based (HTML etc.) and platform independent, or specifically for iPads and iPhones (using Apple’s development tools). We do no longer develop any native Windows solutions, but still maintain a few macro-based Office solutions in accounting.

What will happen to our remaining 500 Windows seats beyond 2013 has not been decided yet, but if MS continues to produce nonsensical toys like Win 8, we will likely stick with 7 until we can replace the remaining seats with OS X or Linux for good.

The problem with microsoft is clearly at the top… They simply don’t have the vision to implement good user/OS interaction..

I could fix this lamentable OS launch in one month.

It will take them years… they suck and everybody knows it.

All the market is so dependent on Microsoft success that they hide the fact that they are killing themselves with poor judgement. Every dev companies that was duped by them will follow them will be thrown in their junk yard..

The sad part is that they have everything to make it work yet, their UI implementation is the worst i have ever seen. Not that it doesn’t have potentiel.. it’s just that there is no real brain with a vision to fix the detail in my opinion..

hire me and place me in charge of the UI before it’s too late and everybody follows you in your own hell hole.

hope they see you and send a job offer…It’s a frustrating company. I did a magazine for their financial services group for 10 years and recall one sr. exec. walking me through the halls and saying the place would function far better if they got rid of a third of the people in the building. Their hiring practices take forever and they still wind up with a person who was well known for something akin to multiple personality disorder in her previous job.

The company that continues to surprise me is IBM which is huge, presumably bureaucratic, but goes from strength to strength.

But I’ve been using a MacBook Air for nearly two years, so what do I know? The Apple word processing app is dreadful tho.

If you are a corporate executive thinking about letting your employees with Windows 8 BYOD, you should pay careful attention to the agreements that your employees had to “sign” when they started their new Windows 8 computers. In some cases, Microsoft has the right to snoop the data. Do you really want such broad license on a device that has access to your corporate network?

Do yourself a favor. Stick with Windows 7 until the technorati has had a chance to dissect Windows 8. Windows 8 is the most invasive, spying OS that Microsoft has ever created.